In search of healthy and fun meals to feed my family, with an eye toward sustainable living.

Here you'll find recipes & ramblings about keeping my family fed with what's available in Alaska between local produce, a little bit of wild harvest, and the modern grocery store.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

Fall special-occasion Meat Pie Recipe

I haven't posted a decent menu in quite a while.Yes, I'm still cooking, and there's been a great variety of fall produce in our CSA box. Tonight we had a very special dinner guest: the prodigal daughterKitchensister has returned!(disclaimer: the photo is from last T-giving: no snow yet!!!)

The RECIPEThe pie is my variation on Paul Prudhomme's "Paulette's Wonderful Meat Pie" -- it's an unusual recipe in that it calls for grated potatoes in the meat filling, and is topped by a white (dairy) topping. I use less meat & more veggies, but it still feels rich & tasty! It's about the yummiest dish I know that uses ground meat.This is not a dinner you can throw together in a hurry. Although it's not complicated, there are LOTS of ingredients, and you gotta start early in the day.I make the pie crust and filling well ahead of dinner (maybe even right after breakfast) -- then all I have to do later is assemble and bake.

Cook the ground meat. Drain if too fatty. Set aside.Saute onion, celery and peppers, in batches, in a little olive oil. Add spices and meat.Add grated root crops, together with enough (but not too much!) liquid to allow them to cook, simmering on low heat. Make sure liquid is mostly evaporated/absorbed by the potatoes before removing from stove. Let this mixture cool down completely.Hint: might want to drain the filling, using a sieve. This is the only "tricky" part of this recipe -- watch out or the pie will be "soggy".

Parboil kale for a few minutes (approx.5) -that helps take the bitterness out of them, which kale can have late in the growing season. In the spring, I might just saute them right with the onions.Other than the parboiling, this saute goes together real quick!

About this blog

Borealkitchen is a blog by an amateur-- I simply enjoy cooking a variety of foods. I was inspired after we started getting a weekly CSA box last winter, which forced me to plan ahead more. This blog is my way of organizing menus and recipes, sharing my family's experiences, plus reflect on food-related issues. I also grow a garden, shop at Farmer's Markets as much as I can, and there's even a little bit of wild harvest as well...Philosophy: Good food, wholesome, mostly. My approach is more product-based than recipe-driven. By this I mean that I try to find something to do with what's in season: this week it might be an abundance of beets, cabbage or collard greens -- then I start searching for meals to incorporate them... I think of recipes as "starting points": when I start cooking, I just start improvising...

My RECIPES are rarely precise: I often just list ingredients ("Bah-humbug" to measuring, except for baking!). If I list recipes from a cookbook, I give the source and variations I've made. If a recipe came from a website, then you'll need to follow the link to the source for the "nitty-gritty" details of that recipe.

Feel free to comment or ask questions. Thanks for visiting!

About Me

I call Alaska home, but am originally from Germany. I'm incredibly lucky to have a job as a naturalist, teaching and hiking the great outdoors. My family:
The Prof (my husband);
Eldest (flown the coop);
Wolfman (teenage son);
Liesl (youngest pixie).